Introducing the Picwing Smart Frame (YC S08) | Hacker News Reader

Introducing the Picwing Smart Frame (YC S08)

picwing.com

81 pointsedawerd72 comments

My grandfather is 90 and has parkinsons and I've been looking for something like this for him. He is still sharp, but he was never good with computers and lately he's pretty much lost whatever ability he had. The key thing I need is the ability to send him podcasts and videos of booktalks that queue up sequentially as if they were blog posts in an RSS feed. What I also need is the ability to check online to see if he's already viewed something, and if so the ability to get rid of it and add more stuff to his queue.

Try http://www.ceiva.com My grandma loves the frame! it only needs dialup and just cycles through the pictures all day. Youu can control which pictures are on tthe frame and it updates every night. she absolutely loves it.

EDIT: woops, I now see you want videos... the ceiva frame doesn't do videos or audio, just pics.

This is awesome. Picwing, any chance of an article on your journey to manufacturing? Engineering the frame, developing the software, finding manufacturers that will work with startups...

I second that, I really would like to see the experience of a startup getting into manufacturing (especially finding the manufacturers and how you work with them)

I third that. I admire that these guys went after a difficult idea (hardware/software combined product) and didn't just settle for yet another web app. Karma will reward them, because their revenue model is simple and it will be much harder for copy-cats to steal their market.

Also, it looks bad-ass (if a little unresponsive).

I want to hear the emergency room story. I heard one of the founders ended up in ER during the building process.

Story time!

Ah, that will be for another blog post. For now, all I'll say is that it involved a hand drill, with a (very hot) metal drill bit, and ended with a few stitches and a recommendation from the doctor not do hardware anymore =)

Aside from being an engaging story, being able to weather an ER visit is another sign of strength of startups.

In any larger company the downside isn't just potentially larger, it's probably larger in expectation. The employee might sue.

In a startup that's just not even considered. Interesting.

Well, we did joke at the ER about Enrique paying me workers compensation for the hospital bill....hahaha

Plenty of manufacturing firms will work with startups. They just have a strict "show me the money" policy.

Once your hardware design is worked out[1], you can order a production run[2] of a few hundred units a month[3].

[1] They will be glad to help you design your product too. The last quote I got for an "idea to device" service was $500k and six months from zero-to-production quality.

[2] As long as most of your components are tape and reel.

[3] Some firms have complete facilities in the US and China. Low volume orders can be done in the US while everything else is sent to China.

Definitely, we'll use our blog for just that. There are a lot of experiences that we've already had that we can write about, and there are lots of experiences that I'm sure we'll have in the future. We'll write about them as much as we can.

Be careful with "smart frame". There are 9 active trademarks with those words, several of which pertain to picture frames.

We've recently learned a lesson about trademarks here. Even simply using the words to in your product description (and not necessarily a product name or slogan) will run you afoul of trademark holders. Also, trademark attorneys will often fish for billable hours with overzealous trademark enforcement.

I don't know how far you've looked into it so far. The product is awesome. Make sure you've got your bases covered, there's going to be some jealousy.

Besides, language shapes debate. Why call it what others call their more inferior products? Seems like a good opportunity for a new name/product category.

Feed frame? Stream frame? App frame?

Go to your nearby Walmart or Best Buy and ask a customer there if feed frame, stream frame, or app frame means anything to them. You need something more basic that the average person would quickly grok. [EDIT: But it's not like I have any better ideas.]

A few years ago, would they have responded to "smart frame"? Why be limited in a name (if they can use it) by the poor technologies of others?

Life frame? Live frame? Living frame?

I like Life Frame. What about Web Frame? Nah, Life Frame beats that one.

Feed frame? Stream frame? App frame?

How about...Picwing?

If we're making up words, let's make up one that is defensible, and can be an "iPod" or a "Kleenex" or at least a "Palm Pilot" (ten years ago) or a "Blackberry", etc.

I'm not that interested in the photo sharing side of the Picwing, but it looks like this could become a pretty badass little device for all sorts of networked display/control applications. Will the OS or API be open for hackers to develop and deploy their own applications? If so, I could totally get on board with this.

Yes, we are planning to release an API to develop new applications for the frame. We have done some work already in that regard but we want to have something very solid before releasing it.

Awesome. The other thing, and I expect you have this in mind already, is that if I were to buy one, I'd want a thinner more modern bezel instead of a picture-framey one. Are you planning to make different styles/colors available in the future?

Def. We'd like to have something that looks a lot slicker in the future.

I'd like to embed them in my walls and use them as control points for my x10 home automation system (already controlled by linux pc and web browser), to view the video feeds off my security cameras, and to control the entertainment systems.

Count me in for 5 or so of the next run!

Yep, I think that you guys may have just created a great hackable device when you thought all you had was a digital picture frame.

Let hacker's thrive. Give them a great, juicy section of your website. If nothing else, put up a wiki stat, so folks can start talking!

Totally. I'd love to see the technical specs of the device. Screen size and resolution, CPU, RAM, storage, networking capabilities, ports, etc.

I have a family member who has autism. The thought has been expressed to me that although he is capable of completing tasks on his own, he often gets sidetracked and will (for example) get to the sink, but forget he's there to brush his teeth. It would be very helpful for him if there was some sort of 'call-to-action' when he enters an area of the house, i.e. a video previously recorded of him brushing his teeth comes on to the screen and he thinks 'oh yeah, brush my teeth!'.

Being able to hack with these and scatter them about the house, add some sort of discovery capabilities (bluetooth enabled wristband? Seperate controller with webcam doing facial recognition? Now we're talkin...) and we're off to the races.

Seems like there are a ton of applications for this, great work!

It looks like the Chumby is a good open hackable alternative

Picwing (or someone) should make the reverse of Eye-Fi (http://www.eye.fi/ ; it's a WiFi enabled SD card that transfers photos from your digital camera to your computer).

The reverse would just be a similar card (probably identical hardware, just different software) that can be plugged into any frame, and automagically download images from Picwing's website, or an RSS feed, or whatever.

I'd buy it.

That sounds awesome - me too.

Wouldn't that end up being the same price as a photo frame with builtin wifi? I guess it would be good for people who already have a regular frame they want to make wireless.

Eye-Fi & PicWing need to team up!

Take a photo(s) from dig camera and instantly it's published on my and my friend's PicWing compatible devices. From photo frames, to TVs to screensavers to Tivos ..Boxee .. Windows Media Center...flickr accounts, facebook profile, etc...

If you ever need a fallback idea you could try turning Picwing into a monitoring tool for NOCs (network/server health) or financial systems. I think you'd have an easy time selling lots of units to both groups of customers, and there's probably a lot of other people who would need a cheap display device for monitoring purposes.

That's a great idea. Thanks for the suggestion !! We have also thought about using them as kiosks for events like conferences or for taking orders in different businesses.

Keep your prices down and your APIs open and people will do this stuff for you, and feel like great hackers for doing it. Kiosks seem like the kind of thing entrepreneurs love to dream up business ideas for and none of them seem to make much impact - that's a purely unscientific intuition.

Keep your prices down and your APIs open and people will do this stuff for you

A mere upvote can't express how good I think this advice is.

This advice will be well noted. Thanks.

How much does this thing cost?

Out of date review:

"One major flaw would be the price issue - it costs a whopping $249 for a 7″ Picwing digital photo frame"

Maybe it's come down by now, but at that price, may as well buy a netbook.

Well, given that this thing appears to be a netbook from a hardware standpoint, it's hard to complain if it costs about as much as a netbook!

Before you conclude that the only thing preventing people from owning netbooks instead of appliances is the price, be sure to spend several hours pondering the lessons of Slashdot's infamous initial review of the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...

I think this frame is pretty exciting, even if the Chumby is more cuddly.

It doesn't matter to me whether they needed the equivalent of a netbook to drive the thing; it matters whether it delivers $250 worth of value. I'm not sure. At that price point, there are too many substitutes to consider.

I'll say this: if the iPhone came in this form factor, there'd be a $3.99 app that would log the contents of your pantry, submit Peapod/Urbangrocer orders, and aggregate/display all viable recipes from Cooks Illustrated. Tapulous would make $2,000,000 off it in their first year. And I'd buy a Picwing to get it.

Not there yet, unless I'm missing something.

This one is even better:

Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...

Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port ...

Raise your hand if you have both ...

Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device ...

There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.

Those were legitimate criticisms at the time. I certainly would have never got one if they hadn't started using USB.

The Picwing is also not as much of a breakthrough as the iPod was, to make an obvious point.

Yeah, a music player that plays music. Novel idea. What's the breakthrough about it?

I think this frame is pretty exciting, even if the Chumby is more cuddly.

I was going to buy a Chumby a while back, but they never made one without leather, and I don't buy animal products, so I think the Picwing is more cuddly than the Chumby, since I don't want to cuddle with dead animal parts.

My first reaction to this video was, "Ooh, now I can finally have a totally awesome alarm clock, and it's not a leater-encased Chumby!" Unfortunately, though, I just got a nice iPod docking clock radio for Christmas from my folks, so I'm not really in the market anymore.

If it's priced at $249, I'll probably pass, since I already have too many random small computing gadgets around the house (XO, G1, DS, Chinese pirate game console portable, Wii, and several regular desktops and a laptop). But, I think for the folks who would be buying a picture frame, spending an extra $100, or so, would be a very easy decision to make. At least, if those folks buying can be made aware of the Picwing.

Besides the larger display, does anyone know how this compares to the chumby?

This is Enrique from picwing. In addition to the larger display, the picwing frame runs on a faster hardware platform, supports Actionscript 3 for application development and doesn't require the user to go to a different computer to customize and install widgets. Eventually we would like to release an application store (running on the frame itself) for people to install new apps for their frame. We are ourselves big fans of the chumby and we have tried to learn from its advantages and shortcomings.

Wish I'd ordered one of these - I just got my parents a Kodak wireless frame (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016NOTOI) and setting it up to pull grandbaby pictures from Flickr was painful. Aside from the predictably terrible software design, it's not a touch screen - it has this weird touch strip on the bottom and right of the screen.

For my parents baby pics/videos plus easy access to NPR podcasts in the kitchen would be very attractive. One button videoconferencing would be very cool too. Good luck with the manufacturing.

This is really cool. Can I ssh into it and load up my own programs to run on it or show an arbitrary web page?

As a true geek and photography hobbyist I wouldn't even think of using it for pictures (LCD, I bet, is terrible - even laptops don't come with decent LCDs anymore) but man... there is so much stuff I could use this for! From weather to error notifications from my production servers, delivered right to on top of my fireplace. Sweeeet.

So this isn't in production yet?

Well, it is running on Linux, so you could pretty much do whatever you want with it. But, we officially only allow running of flash programs that are built using our (loose) framework, so that it integrates nicely with our operating environment.

We did a limited production run, but are currently not producing them anymore so that we can concentrate on software development more.

This is cool stuff. I think picwing will do great as a kind of clock for any kind of data, driven of the internet.

For ex.

1. A web startup could use it to showcase their website metrics (visits,pageviews etc.) in real time. 2. Could be used to show updates about a game - cricket scores for example will be a big hit. Especially inside an office where television is not accessible.

Even just having a photo frame that also displays tomorrow's weather and an NTP-synced clock is a great but simple step forward for photo frames

Emailing to the frame sounds kinda cool, but if this takes off, expect to see a lot of spam photos inviting you to purchase viagra, or go to their porn site etc.

I was concerned about this too when I set up OurDoings to accept photos by email. I don't let users pick their own address to send to; I generate a random one for them.

And yes, emailing to a frame is cool, but I'm biased because I'm doing it.

You can specify which emails are allowed to send pictures to your frame. We have some software that will filter out forged headers on emails as well. So far, it hasn't been a problem for us.

Ah that's cool. I'm just thinking of possible issues in the future. Giving one of these to a grandparent, and then them being emailed goatse etc would not be a good thing.

Will orders be limited to US or will it be international? I am from Canada, the land where most cool tech gadgets dont end up or are a year late :(

Will it show photos from a Media RSS feed?

It has it's own e-mail address?

Great - what happens when a prankster starts mailing Goatse to my living room?

Photosharing sites like flickr have autogenerated email addresses for mobile upload and this doesn't seem to be an issue.

Also it looks like emails to this device goes to the 'messages' app for review first [is this correct?]

Looks really great. What are the physical dimensions of it? As compared to an iPhone or a netbook for example?

Technical specs -- please!!!

I would definitely use it as a way to see analytics data on a website

Noted. A quick search seems to reveal there isn't a google analytics API. Anyone know if there are APIs for any other major analytics suite?

You can have Google analytics e-mail reports to you.

Could you just have them sent to the picwing every hour or so and you guys display the data somehow?

Might want to edit the loading time for the YouTube video out.

So that bloggers can call you on it the same way they did when Apple did the same thing. Nothing like a little drama to spice up a product launch.

I kind of expect loading times on stuff, especially a video, but I don't want to sit through 5 seconds of it when watching a demo. It's boring. People won't hold Picwing to the same standards as Apple.

That is sweet, also Boxee would be a great app for it.

Boxee would really be a cool app for it. Also, we thought about a TV-guide application on the frame as well, so it could be a companion to your TV.

How about an alarm clock? There's more people who use alarm clocks than have twitter accounts. Add your existing weather app, so I can see what to wear in the morning.

Also a simple Facebook feed? Using the Python API you can do this in a few minutes, give me a buzz if you want me to paste example code.

> How about an alarm clock?

Yup, with sleep.fm integration.

Wow! great device looking forward to seeing it at my local store one day :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com